Quality Control - 'High End Boutique' vs 'Overseas/China'

Hand made has never meant better quality. it's only ever meant smaller quantities and more rarity for increased desirability as a status symbol.

The production line was invented for increased throughput, higher yields, and lower prices..

It's just that China had always tried to use the cheapest materials, but has been getting better as their revenues increased.

svart said, "Hand made has never meant better quality."

You must be speaking specifically about gear. Because handmade has often and almost always meant much higher quality. Why are bespoke suits expensive, fine tailoring and better materials. My buddy Mike DiLalla makes guitars. They're one off, one of a kind, and sell for around $2,200-$2,500. Less than the better Les Paul or PRS guitars. You can customize, choose pickups, color, and other specs. Is it better, yes, if having those choices is important to you. Is it as good as the mass manufacture brands like Gibson, Fender, hell yeah. Are the fruit and vegetables I get from the farmers market from farmers I've come to know better than the same at supermarkets, you bet, and their hands were on it fro concept to completion. There are hundred of similar examples. Neumann's still have hands on I believe and Soyuz is completely hand made, and they are in fact better than any Chinese parts mics I've heard yet, as nice as some are.

As for gear, I haven't had many of the higher end boutique pieces, only some of the very nice part Chinese/part American clones of vintage compressors, preamps and EQ's. They've all held up well, but then so has my Stam SA73, which was put together by hand, so I can't truly speak to the issue comprehensively. When it comes to mics though, I've experienced far more issues with the less expensive brands and clone guys than the hands on higher end name brands. Hopefully the Stam SA67 should put an end to that trend for me.

How are they going to know customers aren’t happy with the quality if nobody calls them out? Shouldn’t others know of any known problems before spending their money as well?


I talk to the companies directly to get the issues resolved. Just a pain having stuff go out of commission for weeks or months at a time.

FWIW- Several months ago I purchased a Weight Tank from Eric at Locomotive Audio 
Within an hour or so of this post, he emailed me personally to let me know he saw this thread and wanted to make sure my unit was still in good order. I informed him my unit is working flawlessly. Outstanding service, especially for a smaller operation where someone has to wear many hats! By the way, get a Weight Tank. Well worth the investment.

It’s a funny business. Warm handwires it’s 73 and gets criticized for that. Heritage completely changes the way it’s 73 is manufactured and talks about authenticity? All , I know , sort of , is Stam stuff arrives through immaculate gear conception somewhere west of China and east of Chile ?

Turn it on, if it sounds good: it is good, is as far as I will go !

The outboard gear is actually mostly assembled in China but they do final QC and sometimes some final assembly like knobs or other things there in Chile. As per Joshua.

The mics they assemble in Chile.

Thanks Ragan, I wasn't aware of all the Stam details.

No I mean everything.

Machines have and can manufacture items with much higher precision/accuracy, are perfectly repeatable, and much faster.  Once set up and debugged, they take human-based mistakes out of the equation.

"Hand made" still contains the problems of the human condition.  Things don't align perfectly, aren't perfectly square, aren't repeatable to any significant precision, etc.  There is artistry in the mastercraftsman that might build one-off guitars, but if you were to quantify the attributes that people like about them and put them in a CAD file, you'd get perfect guitars every single time from a CNC machine, and then be able to modify them quickly with a mouse and have the machine spit out perfection.


Farmers vs. supermarkets..  Farmers supply supermarkets.  The only difference is the type of genetically altered produce they choose to grow.  Farmers that grow for supermarkets choose more hardy plants with attributes like "roundup ready", larger fruit/vegetable size, or simply more slowly ripening so the produce doesn't spoil in a truck on the way to the supermarket.  A gardener who grows enough produce to sell on a roadside stand might choose a different variety that grows more quickly, is a smaller size but generates more individual pieces, and doesn't need to be resistant to herbicides or regional diseases.

It's a simple as needs.  The supermarket has a specific need to fill, as does the roadside seller.  The produce to fill those needs doesn't necessarily have to align at all, so no comparison can be accurately made here.

You're comparing guitars to tomatoes without looking at the details. The details are where the argument is fought, and the details are where the reasons come from, not the other way around.

I saw something about a suit from Eric.. Once a pattern is made, a machine can cut and stitch with higher precision/accuracy and ultimately with stronger and more complex sewing techniques than a person can do.  I mean you don't see people hand stitching anything on a 2K$ suit..  No, you see them use a sewing MACHINE, because they have become ubiquitous enough that the average person could afford one.  At one time, they cost too much and people still sewed by hand, but not anymore because the machine can do the stitching is faster, more accurate and does things that humans can't do.


I know some folks will say "but if machines were better, everyone would use them!".

Machines are better.  They're also ridiculously expensive.  You think that guy who's building 10 guitars a year is going to be able to afford a 100K$ CNC/EDM/Waterjet/Laser machine to cut out guitar bodies, necks, fingerboards and pickguards?  Not yet, but things like waterjets and 2D laser cutters are getting a LOT cheaper and some folks who make things like custom pickguards are already using those.

But for our guitar guy, of course he can't afford the big CNC for cutting guitar bodies out.  But if he did, and became proficient with some sort of CAD, he could design things that would make even the most learned master woodworker cry.

The issue is that machines are completely able to do the manual labor much quicker, easier and more reliably than humans, but they cost a LOT to get going, which is why they've always been used for mass production.  You can make your money back with mass production fairly quickly, but you can't with onesy-twosey products.

Also, mass machine production has been seen as sub-quality for some time, but you also have to remember that even though these machines are much quicker than humans, they still take time.  Someone makes the tradeoff between precision and speed to meet the market demands.  

You don't need widgets from wal-mart to have 1/10000th of an inch accuracy.  Hell, probably 1/10" is probably still better than you need..  So they program the machines to be faster but more sloppy.  You get more manufacturing throughput that way.  Machines needing to change cutters or angles to increase precision takes time, and time is money.   In fact, during my time working with CNC machines, they often charged increasing premiums for higher precision.  +/-0.01" was a standard rate, which orders of magnitude higher precision added 10-50% to the costs per part depending on the complexity and materials.

Mark my words though, we're going to see a renaissance with "printing" materials soon.  They're on the cusp of mass metal printing and it'll revolutionize machine work.  Places like NASA and car manufacturers already use additive metal printing or powdered metal forging for parts instead of CNC.  In 25 years nothing will be CNC'd except the odd part.



One more thing..  3D scanning.

We're already scanning objects with 3D laser capture devices.   We can scan something, like a guitar, and then input it into CAD as a perfect digital copy, then export to a CNC for a perfect real copy.  

Now imagine if tailors started scanning human bodies to make their suits.  You stand up in a booth, get scanned, and now your perfect suit dimensions are known.  Human error is taken out of the equation as a CNC machine cuts out the cloth in your exact dimensions..

But I digress.

"Hand made" does not equal quality.  The attributes that define quality transcend artistry, which is what I think you're really equating as "quality".

I’m going to tell you a dirty secret, a lot of what you might think is hand built boutique gear isn’t hand made. The manufacturer uses a sub contractor who uses a parts loader and wave solder machine, it’s still expensive because they can’t meet the quantity for big economies of scale and might do more hand assembly but a lot is far from hand made. Labor isn’t cheap, it just requires less intitial investment, but renting somebody else’s huge investment can sure save money.

You would be surprised by how much of a Gibson Fender or Even smaller company uses CNC machines, hell I can’t say who but I know of at least 3 highend boutique solid body manufacturers who have their body’s CNCed in KC to their specs ( I have a NDA with the company doing the work so can’t say or hint). Sure they are hand finished but again it’s about the repeatability and presicion.
I’ll bet in this day in age many of the custom suits are made using a CNC cutter, I know a small yacht maker who found using CNC for cutting hard and soft goods cut their waste by 20% in these areas.

I have built a lot of custom one-offs for people, and custom rackups. I'd like to think given the difficulty of offering service after the fact that it makes me pay more attention to getting it right, but it's inevitable that something will go wrong sometime. I've built more than one thing for myself that had a new off the shelf part fail within weeks; it's gonna happen. If I ever do that for a customer, then my failure rate looks like 100% because there's only one. With a lot of rack-up jobs, any tech should be able to sort a repair down the line, but....find a tech.....is that better or worse than having a mass produced thing from a company that's gone?

A lot of Chinese cheap product may not get QC at all, other than making sure it doesn't immediately let the smoke out, but then they may give better service in that when one fails, they just immediately send you a replacement.

I've had a couple small boutique branded companies replace a piece with the new version when I had a repair issue 15+ years later, on the basis they couldn't get exact parts to repair the original. I got a new one at a cost similar to the repair rate.

There is a somewhat quaint beauty to hand made items that many - myself included - find attractive and worth paying for. So much so that many mass produced items seek to "humanize" their final output in a somewhat obvious attempt at "hand made". I have no problems with either method and have lots of gear that falls into both categories.



I will say that if I've had a personally commissioned piece of technically complex gear made - not a guitar or the like - I sure like the builder to be located close to me. There's no doubt that components fail, solder points get wanky, etc.. If you're not tech savvy (I'm not very savvy), then being able to easily "return to builder" is pretty important.